When you think about the environmental impact of washing your face, you’re probably just worried about wasting water. Unfortunately, when you’re scrubbing away every morning you could also be washing the health of our oceans down your drain.
When you consider that every plastic water bottle, spoon, or yogurt tub you've ever used will probably outlive you, plastic begins to seem like a bad idea. And when you hear how much plastic we've forced upon our oceans - you'll realise our plastic addiction is catastrophic.
Right now, soft drinks giant Coca-Cola is trying to block a world class recycling scheme in NSW - a scheme that already works in other places, like South Australia.
From July 2017, you’ll get 10c back for every can and bottle you recycle. It may not sound like much, but it worked for South Australia with double the recycling rate of other states. It’s the system we were promised by Premier Mike Baird back in 2015 - and he was dragging his heels until Greenpeace supporters rallied to defend earlier this year against Coke-led attacks
Turtles are awesome. Seriously, they’re living dinosaurs that have survived against all odds to roam the oceans for more than 100 million years. They live about as long as elephants, and rock their wrinkles in the same way.
‘I’ll just chuck it in my backpack’.
That’s what I said to the cashier in Albert Heijn, the biggest Dutch supermarket on the streets of Amsterdam.
She had tried to charge me .50€ cents for a plastic bag so that I could carry my bunch of bananas 100m down the road. It was more than the bananas themselves had cost.
I’ve spent a significant portion of the last 6 years forcing turtle poop through a sieve. Seriously. As a sea turtle researcher focused on understanding the what, why, and where of turtles eating harmful plastics, I’ve had to cut open hundreds of sea turtles stranded dead on beaches in Moreton Bay and the Queensland coast to see what is in their digestive system.
